A court has heard that a mother found a used, bloodied syringe in a loaf she had bought from Tesco. She was making a sandwich for her 10-year-old son at the time, and she was said to have been very distressed by the discovery.

The hypodermic syringe situation screamed after-production tampering to me as soon as I started to read it. But then the next question is, what can you do to prevent it? Unlike the OTC medicine bottles which are already rigid and just needed security seals, bread wrappers are soft, and it would probably be prohibitive to make them hard enough to avoid tampering. You could certainly seal the bags the way so many other things wrapped in flexible wraps are, but what them - a needle pokes through so easily. Worse, chemicals can be injected. So much of the functioning of a modern society is reliant on people generally observing some basic standards of decency.

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We reported in September last year how Katie Crabtree, a 31 -year-old mother-of-two from Stockport, bit into a dead, sliced, rodent tucked into a Tesco sandwich. She complained to the store and to head office, and was eventually given £10 compensation.

"Lady, we thought you knew the 'ham. sand.' was short for hamster sandwich."

So much of the functioning of a modern society is reliant on people generally observing some basic standards of decency.

That's true in so many ways. And while we might, in theory, be able to make all our food completely safe from such things, through hard packaging, it would be expensive, impractical, and ultimately dangerously wasteful.

McDonald's proved it hadn't served up any leaping lizards, after preliminary lab tests laid to rest the reptile ruckus that erupted when a customer claimed to have found a baby lizard in her chicken sausage McMuffin.